Coloniality in the origins of Brazilian racial thought

Abstract

The various conceptions of race relations that emerged over the course of the 20th century are strongly related to the movements of Brazilian elites and social movements. At the same time, with their own historical limitations, some conceptions asserted themselves and others opened up an alternative way of interpreting Brazilian reality. There is no doubt that the work of Florestan Fernandes and Carlos Hasenbalg opened up an epistemological rupture that is relevant to current political and educational reflections in the 21st century. This text aims to discuss how racialization, the ideology of whitening and the myth of racial democracy, as categories of analysis of Brazilian race relations, have been forged since the mid-19th century, based on the concept of coloniality. In other words, a concept that mobilizes us to think from subaltern experiences, what the republican elites and their intelligentsia tried to impose, that is, a nation project perpetrated by a geopolitics of knowledge. Coloniality is understood here as a pattern of power that arose as a result of modern European colonialism, but it is not limited to “a formal relationship of power between peoples or nations; it refers to the way in which work, knowledge, authority and intersubjective relations are articulated with each other through the global capitalist market and the idea of race.” (MALDONADO-TORRES, 2007, p. 131). Coloniality survives to this day “in learning manuals, in the criteria for academic work, in culture, in common sense, in the self-image of peoples, in the aspirations of subjects, and in so many other aspects of our modern experience”. (idem).